Over the years there have been many attempts to introduce new cooking technologies that would allow faster cooking of foods. Products such as convection, microwave, and infrared ovens have been devised in order to try and speed up the cooking process. However the new cooking technologies caused consumers to guess how to properly cook foods, e.g., time, power used, etc. Guidelines were presented as to how to best cook using a new technology, but required much trial and error before satisfactory cooking results were obtained. Quite often the user was frustrated and took a long time to arrive at reasonable results.
With subsequent technology enhancements in the new cooking technology products, e.g., microwave ovens, these products began to include some pre-programmed functions, e.g., buttons for cooking popcorn, baked potatoes, and frozen foods. Unfortunately, these pre-programmed functions still fell short in meeting the user's expectations. With differing amounts of food to be cooked, these pre-programmed functions proved inadequate for all situations. Yet other new technologies provided a complex interface where the user was required to reply to multiple questions in order to approximate a cooking cycle. The resulting cooking cycle would be adjusted for the amount of food to be cooked. This was particularly important since the new cooking technologies were not able to cook varying amounts of food in the same time frame.